“It is a daunting task to define any type of consciousness and reach agreement. For the sake of exploration [in this paper] it was assumed that consciousness is multilayered, pliable, and a separate function apart from the physical shell of the brain. Rather than identifying one state as altered and another as subconscious, unconscious and so on, it is more appropriate to talk about various states relative to their functions in the life-world.

“This is not to suggest that the physical world is the sole driver for all layers of consciousness, but it does present the dominant stimuli for how we experience and come to describe our perceptions both of the physical world and of the mental world. Our collection of experiences and the subsequent perceptions developed about the physical world permit production of a priori fundamentals that enable deeper exploration of the multilayered consciousness.”

–K. M. McCann, from a paper titled “The role of triggers in inducing hypnotic altered states: Perceptions of transpersonal hypnotherapists,” printed in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2016